Atlanta Journal Constitution

VISUAL ARTS: Not-so-subtle paintings make points with a cinematic flair
Jerry Cullum - For the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, September 25, 2005

REVIEW

"Lynn Davison"

Through Oct. 1. $1,800---$18,000. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdays. Trinity Gallery, 315 E. Paces Ferry Road, Atlanta. 404-237-0370. www.trinitygallery.com

The verdict: Lynn Davison's art is an odd, compelling, utterly wonderful experience.

Lynn Davison makes both the funniest and the most frightening paintings you're likely to see this season. Sometimes, but not always, both at once.

"Shouldn't Own Pets" is Davison at her most antic. A girl with a slight resemblance to the Mad magazine figure of Alfred E. Neuman clutches a cat falling awkwardly out of a bag. The motif introduces a body of work at Trinity Gallery in which, metaphorically, the cat is forever falling out of the bag. Or, as in "That Darn Cat," it's escaping its would-be rescuer, bagged but desperately sinking its claws into the upper reaches of a tree trunk.

The bagged creature eventually slides over into horror fiction, as strange claws protrude from the swaddling clothes of the bundle in "Rosemary's Baby." The children staring solemnly at a closed bundle in "The Protectress" possess an air of bemused mystery that leaves it unclear whether the thing in the bag is in need of protection or makes the sister feel the need to protect her brother.

So the work is cinematic, realistic enough that a painting of sleeping children could sell well in far less edgy surroundings. It's as darling as the Florida artist's smaller renderings of insomniacs and troubled sleepers are frightening. And a large figure study of an aging male nude sprawled on a bed has more in common with Lucian Freud's brutally honest glimpses of finitude and flawed psychology than with Philip Pearlstein's glossily sanitized bodies.

Davison ranges from serious analysis to downright weirdness. "Dillo Rules" puts an armadillo skeleton at the head of a class in which the pupils are children's toys. This is the final work in a trilogy in which the preceding "Dinner's Over" may well be the strangest mix of arbitrary symbols ever. In it, a man in an aviator's helmet, beset by a world map falling on him, spills the armadillo skeleton off a large clean plate as he sits on a couch with a cartoony child's toy next to him.

This peculiar mix appears in the same exhibition as "Johnny Came Late," a fairly straightforward version of the 19th-century symbolist image of the head of John the Baptist on a platter --- together, an indication that here is an artist whose dozen years of exhibiting have given her a sense of complete freedom to follow her compulsions and fascinations. She paints things in sacks because she likes the ambiguous possibilities of mystery and comedy, plus the fact that the look of crumpled cloth is amazing.

It's a bonus that Davison, whose body of work sparks with imagination, is also a skilled painter.